How Dare They Take A Knee During That Song That Plays Before Sports Games!

I’m a big fan of the Bill of Rights. In case you’ve been too busy screaming about immigrants and or looking at food pictures on Instagram, the Bill of Rights are the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America. After the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, each of the original 13 colonies held a convention where delegates met to decide whether to abandon the former Articles of Confederation to form our current Union. Think of it as a reality show, where during the 1789 season, the question was out there hanging over the would-be nation: “Will the states adopt this Constitution?” The answer actually seemed to be “No,” until an agreement was reached that IF the colonies adopted the new Constitution, THEN the first order of businesses for the new government would be the passage of the amendments we now know as the Bill of Rights. Think of the original Constitution as the blueprint for how the new government would operate, while the Bill of Rights are what give our country its distinctive moral character, by allowing The People to assemble together, to bare arms, to receive due process when accused of a crime, and to speak freely.

Sometimes, somebody burns a draft card, or burns their bra, right in the middle of the street. Sometimes, somebody burns an American flag, or takes a knee during the Star Spangled Banner–on TV nonetheless (!)–and then certain other people go apoplectic. All of a sudden these people become political scientists arguing chicken versus egg scenarios:

“How can someone have the right to burn the flag or take a knee during the national anthem, which are like symbols of our country, when the whole reason they have a right to have free speech is because of the country? It ought to be considered treason and they should be shot!”

You end up listening to a diatribe that’s not very different than listening to someone who has been the same religion since they were infants talking about their religion and how it makes the most sense out of all of the religions and it makes more sense than agnosticism or atheism. It’s not so much a conversation as somebody yelling about something they are certain they are right about, and they go hysterical if you argue with them.

So now, in case you missed it, some NFL players are putting their knees on the ground during the National Anthem, as a protest about something, and the President of the United States, whose business and political career are based on getting people to talk about him constantly like a kind of bomb-throwing-Michigan-J-Frog, tweeted that the owners of NFL teams should fire anybody who takes a knee, and then a lot more players–whole teams, some coaches, some fans–put their knees down during the National Anthem, and now the people that hate anybody who protests anything are out again, arguing that the knee-takers owe a lot to the country for being the place where they were born and therefore shouldn’t disrespect the Star Spangled Banner.

I’m going to say something here, and a lot of people will get mad, but somebody ought to say it:

Who really cares about the Star Spangled Banner?

The song is more than 200 years old, but not old enough to be from the Revolution. It’s from the War of 1812, which few people know the details about. It was pretty much the worst war for the U.S. in our history. A lot of the same people that go crazy over flag burning or taking God out of the Pledge of Allegiance go around repeating this weird old lie that “We’ve been very lucky, the U.S. has never had a war fought on its soil.” Except that during the War of 1812 we lost almost every land battle, the President had to flee Washington D.C., and the British burned the Capitol and the White House. “Well, I meant besides that,” these people might say.

The Star Spangled Banner was written by attorney Francis Scott Key as the British bombarded Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor. The poem celebrates the fact that the flag was still flying over the fort after a night of bombardment, so Baltimore might yet avoid capture. It does not mention that nobody knew where President Madison was at the time, while the White House and Capitol were on fire. I suppose the song has always appealed to those True Patriots who try to put the best face on the conditions of the country at a given time. So then this poem goes on to be popular, and they put it to the tune of a British song (how ironic), and about 117 years later Congress made it the official song of American officialdom, replacing such classics as God Bless America and My Country Tis of Thee, the latter of which is also supposed to inspire patriotism in everybody’s hearts even though no one knows what the heck a -tis-of-thee is, or what it means for My Country.

Very few people know the words to these songs, or why or when then were written. No one listens to them in their cars; the songs don’t play in the grocery stores, or at local parades because we don’t really have those anymore. The only time anybody hears these songs is when they go to a sports game. After spending a hundred dollars on a ticket and the last three hours getting drunk and throwing bean bags into a corn hole, everybody gets silent for three minutes while the high school glee club or a celebrity that can hit three octaves comes out and everybody puts their hands over their hearts and gets a tear in their eye, and that’s America Being Patriotic, and the point is to get done with that solemn obligation as soon as possible to get back to drinking and media watching and forgetting about your hard job, etc.

Then somebody takes a knee and it just ruins the pageant of the whole thing. They take a knee and it’s like an audience member at a Broadway show shouting “Hey everybody, those are actors up there, not real people.” It jerks the audience out from their immersion in the narrative.

And that is what really aggravates the people. That is what really makes a protester intolerable. I mean if you go to a Broadway show, and somebody jars you out of the narrative, you’d be annoyed, because you paid a lot of money to be there and have the experience of paying a lot of money to forget about your life for a couple of hours, and if you go to a sports game or watch it on TV, it’s like the same thing. People want to sit there and drink their beer and eat their frozen food and they don’t want to think about the beer coming from a huge international corporation that owns all the other beer companies that used to be locally owned and independent; they don’t want to think about the nacho cheese that isn’t a dairy product and comes from petroleum; they don’t want to think about the chicken wings coming from a huge corporate farm where the chickens never see sunlight before they die–they want to believe the commercials that show Joe the Farmer and the the Coors Lights being mined out of the ice already in cans in the Rockies. I get it. We pretend there are small farmers like the guy in the commercial, and we pretend there are medium-sized breweries the same as there was back in good ole 1950 like they show in the commercials, and we pretend we’re all united together like they show in the soft drink commercials, and the commercials leave out anything bad the way that Frank Key left the burning of Washington out of his Star Spangled Banner…and then some inconsiderate jerk takes a knee during the patriotic song that comes before the ceremony of the game like the bell ringing before Pavlov fed his dogs, and ruins the whole thing!

I once took a Philosophy of Law class and the professor said something that changed my view of government. She said that most people think of The Law as a list of things that you’re not allowed to do, but most of The Law facilitates human activity. It establishes the processes by which people get married, form businesses, or buy houses, get insured. The Law is a system of rules like those of a baseball game, which must be established before the players can start the game. The professor also pointed out that a function of the law is to take care of problems so that we don’t have to think about them all of the time. When you see a person on the street begging for money, you don’t have to feel personally responsible for them, because you know that some government agency somewhere exists to help them. If you swerve to avoid a pothole, you don’t have to think about when you and your neighbors can get some asphalt to fill the thing in, you know that some government agency somewhere has filling-potholes as one of their responsibilities. You don’t have to worry that somebody’s house will catch on fire and no one will come, because there are fire companies; that you won’t be able to get food, because there are grocery stores and a Department of Agriculture and a Department of Commerce, etc. Well, that’s all fine and good, but now we have a government that doesn’t seem able to deal with a growing number of problems. It’s not about the Democrats or the Republicans, but I suspect that more people are worried now than they were ten or fifteen years ago, because The President represents The Government to most people, and the current President doesn’t really seem genuine or like he particularly cares about the majority of citizens or that he grasps the gravity of a lot of the problems or that he is able to focus long enough to really study the causes of some of the country’s problems, let alone to form a plan that would reverse some of the negative trends that everybody sees but tries to forget about while watching football. It is a big problem because if you don’t trust that The Government can or will deal with society’s problems, then you have to start thinking about them yourself, and one of the main reasons any people have any government is to do their societal thinking for them.

So people are taking knees at football games, and now spectators have to think about how we have a lot of problems which The Government isn’t addressing. This seems like about the most American think I can imagine. And it seems necessary.

Necessary, because, really, most people do not engage in any meaningful way in politics, and that just doesn’t work in a democracy. Reading a political blog or liking a post or making a comment doesn’t really do anything. Giving money to this or that organization or political party or candidate, and voting, is only slightly more effective. Basically people like what they already like, give money to people or groups that already exist, and they are more or less equalled out by people who believe the opposite and like the opposite posts and give money to the opposite people and groups, and nothing ever happens. All these billions get soaked up in an argument machine and all this human energy gets used to argue, like 16 very big men playing tug of war. They could have built something with all their labor but instead one side just pulled the other toward them a few inches, one group of spectators cheered while the other booed, and it was a big waste of time.

So some guy who feels frustrated looking at this takes a knee during the Star Spangled Banner, and the President tweets that he ought to be fired because the knee-taking basically suggests that government isn’t doing a good job. And the government isn’t doing a good job, but Joe Spectator gets mad because he wants to pretend during the football game that the government is doing a good job, because the football game is fantasy, and the commercials that show small farmers and businesses are fantasy, and the food is fake and the house is made of modular parts and the car was designed to be obsolete before the loan payments are paid and the kids are withdrawing into their cell phones and none of this is like it was when Grandpa got back from the war, and it seems like it’s on the road to getting worse, and Joe Spectator does not want to think about this, but now he starts to think about it, and the house of cards starts to fall apart.

People would rather not think about how fake and crappy our culture is, and how it seems like we used to have moral integrity but we don’t anymore, and how the government seems like it used to be full of geniuses and now it’s just party hacks, etc ad nauseum. The knee-taking at the football game makes them think about that.

The easy solution: fire the player, or call him crazy or ungrateful. That way it’s HIS personal problem, and We Don’t Have To Think About It Anymore!